Tag Archives: learning

Feb 17 2026
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Assessment, lesson ideas, literacy, Teaching Reading, Teaching Writing, Uncategorized, Universal Design Learning (UDL)

Boost Academic Success: Vocabulary Strategies for Students

It is important to provide vocabulary in secondary classrooms for academic success. Expanding students vocabulary enhances their ability to comprehend complex texts, it enhances comprehension and improves writing. Students who can express their ideas with a broader range of words produce more coherent and persuasive writing. 

Providing explicit vocabulary instruction can improve students critical thinking skills by enhancing their ability to analyze, evaluate, and interpret information. A rich vocabulary is essential for critical thinking.  Word precision and verbal fluency are communication skills that are necessary in all aspects of life. A rich vocabulary equips students with a broader range of words, making them more articulate and confident speakers. 

“As teachers, it is impossible for us to teach students every word they need to know to understand all texts they might encounter. At the same time, teaching students how to learn from context is vital to their ability to read independently and learn from texts that have new and unknown words.”— Janet Allen, Tools for Teaching Content Learning 

The ultimate goal of all vocabulary development is for students to become independent word learners.

Vocabulary instruction happens before, during, and after a lesson. Here are five strategies to try with your students for intentional word work.

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These strategies can happen before, during, and after a reading or inquiry. Students should be provided with MULTIPLE reading assignments and/ or activities so that they are forced to engage with the text and vocabulary repeatedly. The following points are highlighted by T. Cotton, 2024:

  • Multiple Exposures: Effective Vocabulary & Reading Instruction requires multiple opportunities to ENCOUNTER, ENGAGE with, & ELABORATE on the content area vocabulary & text.
  • Visual Representations: The brain processes visuals faster than it processes text. High-interest visual representations help with student retention, make visual connections with the terms, and support ALL LEARNERS!
  • Graphic Organizers: Vocabulary Text Evidence Chart & Concept Map

If you would like to learn more vocabulary strategies, I will continue to post ideas to engage and activate word learning. Share any recommendations or word work that you know helps word learning stick.

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Jan 01 2026
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Culturally Resonate Teaching, Ed Tech, literacy

Looking Back to Move Forward: Teaching, Writing, and Learning in Motion

It’s been a little over a month since I last published a post here, and if there’s one thing 25 years in education has taught me, it’s that pauses are not signs of stopping—they’re often signs of deep work happening beneath the surface.

As I step into a new school year and reflect on the past one, I’m reminded why I’ve kept The Teaching Factor going for more than 15 years: teaching is never static. Our classrooms, our students, and we ourselves are always in motion—learning, revising, and recalibrating.

Highlights from a Year of Active Learning and Creative Risk-Taking

This past year has been full in the best way.

  • I published a Jump Start Guide on Active Learning with ISTE, a project rooted in the belief that students learn best when they are doing, creating, questioning, and reflecting.
  • I continued work on the Second Edition of New Realms for Writing, which will be published this spring with NCTE. Revisiting this book has been a powerful reminder that writing instruction must evolve alongside our learners, tools, and contexts. I am so excited to share all the new and updated materials, technology considerations, lesson plans, and resources with you.
  • I had the privilege of presenting at conferences—both in person and online—connecting with educators who are experimenting boldly with instruction, literacy, AI, and blended learning.
  • And, most importantly, I stayed connected to classrooms—my own and others—where the real work of teaching and learning continues every day.
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Across all of these spaces, the conversations kept circling back to the same essential question:
How do we design learning experiences that are meaningful, human, and empowering?

Core Teaching Strategies That Continue to Matter

Even as tools and technologies shift, there are instructional principles I keep returning to—and keep sharing—because they work.

1. Active learning is not an add-on.
Whether through digital notebooks, inquiry-based projects, discussion protocols, or creative writing tasks, students need opportunities to engage, not just comply. Active learning invites ownership and curiosity.

2. Writing is thinking.
Across content areas, writing remains one of the most powerful tools for making learning visible. Low-stakes writing, multimodal composition, and reflection help students process ideas and develop voice—not just produce products.

3. Choice fuels motivation.
From Genius Hour projects to differentiated pathways, choice gives students agency. When learners can make meaningful decisions, engagement and accountability increase.

4. Structure supports creativity.
Scaffolds, mentor texts, and clear routines don’t limit creativity—they enable it. The most successful classrooms balance freedom with intentional design.

5. Reflection completes the learning cycle.
Students (and teachers) need time to pause, look back, and name what they’ve learned. Reflection builds metacognition, resilience, and growth.

Looking Ahead: What’s New and What’s Next

As this school year unfolds, I’m excited about what’s ahead:

  • The release of New Realms for Writing, Second Edition and the conversations it will spark around authentic, creative, and purposeful writing.
  • Continued work with educators exploring AI as a tool for thinking, not shortcuts, and as a way to support—not replace—human learning.
  • Sharing classroom-tested strategies here on the blog and on Instagram, where I’ll continue posting ideas, reflections, and practical takeaways you can use right away.

More than ever, I believe educators need spaces to reflect, experiment, and learn from one another. The Teaching Factor remains that space for me—and I hope for you as well.

If you’ve been teaching for one year or twenty-five, my hope is that this year brings renewed energy, thoughtful risk-taking, and moments of joy in learning.

Here’s to a year of active classrooms, curious minds, and writing that matters.

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Nov 21 2025
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Culturally Resonate Teaching, lesson ideas, literacy, Teaching Reading, Teaching Writing

NCTE #2025 Presentation Materials

Looking forward to seeing you in Denver, Colorado for National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention. I am so excited to be presenting two different sessions. Below you can find information about these sessions and access my slide decks.

Friday morning I will be presenting New Realms for Writing: Inspire Student Expression with Digital Age Formats

There are so many ways to support student writers in your classroom. Whether you’re working with elementary or high school students, there are strategies that support students with and without technology. If we want students to be creative communicators, we need to expand the role, formats, and audience for writing across the content areas.

Today, words are multisensory experiences that are seen, heard, and experienced through podcasting, filmmaking, storytelling, gaming, virtual reality, and design. Writing has evolved in genre, medium, and dimensions. In this day and age, why relegate our students to writing essays? There are so many other possibilities. In my classroom, I want students to be critical consumers of information in all these different formats as well as creative thinkers in the way they present their learning and understanding. I am all for choices and giving students the ability to choose the best format that fits their message. 

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Digital Storytelling, Multigenre projects, poetry, podcasts, filmmaking are just a handful of writing genres and modalities to explore with students and offer in our classroom to help bolster literacy skills. Whether you use these or your own innovations, strive to use writing to spark authentic and meaningful learning experiences that bring student voice to the forefront and engage your students as stakeholders in their own learning. Our students are creators in their own right as video producers, songwriters, bloggers, gamers, and storytellers. Why not use their strengths to hone in on their writing skills and continue to remix and write new texts with limitless possibilities? Access the slide deck HERE.

Friday afternoon I am part of a session titled, ELA Partnerships and Performance: From Science Literacy to Readers Roundtable where I will be presenting To Infinity & Beyond: ELA and Science Partnerships to Boost Reading, Writing, and Visual Thinking Skills. This presentation will introduce a cross curricular writing unit for students to research a topic on climate and weather that interests them and then write an investigative feature article that blends personal narrative writing with research.

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Writing is required in both English and Science to showcase thinking and learning. Both contents overlap in argumentative writing. Writing is a process and requires planning, research, writing, revising, rereading, and then writing and revising some more. Research and evidence collection are part of the prewriting stage writers engage in at the beginning of the writing process. The challenge is to take notes and turn them into a written piece that expresses their ideas. Scaffolding tools such as outlines, graphic organizers and sentence starters are useful writing tools for getting ideas down on paper in this prewriting stage, as are infographics.

Throughout the unit students are using critical thinking skills, developing a visual understanding, and building their literacy skills of reading, writing, and speaking. When the topics of our units are relevant to our students’ lives and they are allowed to make choices about what they want to write about, student voice and agency are at the forefront of learning. 

With intentional teaching moves all teachers can empower students to learn deeply about their world, themselves, and others. To view the presentation slide deck click HERE.

If you are #NCTE25 be sure to say hi.
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May 01 2025
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Culturally Resonate Teaching, lesson ideas

Active Learning Strategies to Engage Students

Students learn when they are engaged in a classroom lesson. Rather than have students passively interact with information, active learning requires students to engage in classroom learning through discussion, problem solving, collaboration, hands on learning and classroom experiences. Active Learning is an instructional approach that engages students in learning beyond reading, listening, and viewing. When students take ownership of their own learning, reflecting, questioning, applying knowledge in the real world and authentic learning experiences student engagement and deeper thinking is enhanced. 

Key Characteristics of Active Learning:

Technology plays a role in enabling participation, interaction, and personalized learning experiences.

Students are active participants, not passive listeners.

Learning is student-centered and focuses on higher-order thinking (e.g., analyzing, evaluating, creating).

Collaboration, feedback, and reflection are integral.

Active Learning Strategy

Jigsaws

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We have different readers in our classroom so why do we assign the same text for all students to read. The teacher breaks students up into a group and each student in the group has a specific reading or task which they are responsible for reporting back to their group members. Just as in a jigsaw puzzle, each piece, each student’s part, is essential for the completion and full understanding of the final product. This active learning strategy helps support the diverse learners in your classroom, promote collaboration, and provide individuals with a key part that links to a whole. 

Roll the Dice 

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Roll the Dice, also called Think Dots, provides six questions or tasks for students to collaborate and discuss around a topic or unit of study. Each student takes a turn to roll a die – you can use digital dice or traditional dice – and answers the question or completes the task based on the number rolled. Each task or question is progressively more difficult and connected to the learning objective. 

Socratic Seminar

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Looking for a discussion based strategy where the students are in charge of the conversation, try a Socratic Seminar.  In this discussion strategy a student begins by asking an open-ended question. Students listen closely to the comments of others, thinking critically for themselves, articulate their own thoughts and their responses to the thoughts of others. To scaffold the discussion and encourage discussion, the teacher might prepare a handful of questions for a student to choose from to kick off the conversation.

Station Rotation

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Learning Stations are situations or centers around the classroom that a teacher sets up for students to work in small groups. Each of these centers has supplies and materials that work well together and give students the tools to complete activities and mini-projects. Station can be digital or not. Students move around the classroom to complete the different stations and learn, draw connections,  apply, and evaluate classroom materials. 

Scavenger Hunts

Scavenger Hunts promote Inquiry Based Learning and collaboration. Students can use a tech tool like Go Formative to explore and answer open and closed questions about a topic.

Question Trails

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In this movement based active learning strategy students follow the “trail” of multiple-choice questions that will show what they have learned. Question trails can be completed in collaboration or individually. Students answer a series of multiple-choice questions and are prompted to move to the next question based on their answer. If students answer a question incorrectly, they will end up with a question they have already answered which means they will need to backtrack to see where they made an error. 

What are your favorite active learning strategies? Share your active learning activities in the comments section.

In the next few weeks I plan to share more.

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Mar 02 2025
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Culturally Resonate Teaching, lesson ideas, literacy, SEL, Teaching Reading

Scaffolding Reading Instruction & Inviting Students to Engage Deeply with Texts

In my book Creative SEL: Using Hands-On Projects to Boost Social Emotional Learning co-written with Mark Gura (ISTE, 2023) I share a short video from James Robinson “I Have a Visual Disability, And I Want You To Look Me In the Eye” | NYT Opinion (2021) as a text to read closely and critically to address themes around identity, disability, what is defined as typical and normal, and relationships.

I am so excited that James Robinson has expanded on this video to publish his personal memoir this month. Whale Eyes: A memoir about seeing and being seen (Penguin Random House, March 2025). Having read an advanced copy of this book, I am so excited not just by Robinson’s extended story and insight but the layout and organization of the book as well. As described by the published, the book is “told through an experimental mix of intimate anecdotes and interactive visuals, immersing readers in James’s point of view, allowing them to see the world through his disabling eye conditions.”

I already share the video with my middle school students as part of a book club unit on identity, but in scaffolding their reading there are a few activities that help make reading more accessible to the diverse readers in my classroom. Providing the text in print, digital, audio, and visual texts is one way to make the reading accessible with multimodal formats. Before, during, and after reading strategies can also help students understand and connect with the reading.

Scaffolding Before Reading with Anticipation Guides

An anticipation guide is a pre-reading strategy that presents students with a series of statements related to a new topic, asking them to agree or disagree before reading, which activates their prior knowledge, builds curiosity about the upcoming material, and essentially acts as a scaffold by providing a structured framework for engaging with the text and checking their understanding afterwards; it helps them actively connect their existing knowledge to the new information they will learn.

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Scaffolding Before & During Reading with Visuals and Images

Providing visuals and images before and during the reading process is helpful to activate background knowledge, make connections and provide deeper understanding. When sharing visuals, an activity like See, Think, Wonder acts as a reading scaffold by prompting students to first make careful observations about a text or image (“see”), then interpret what they see by forming thoughts and inferences (“think”), and finally, generate questions and wonderings to deepen their understanding and engagement with the material, effectively activating prior knowledge and setting the stage for deeper analysis before diving into the full text. 

Scaffolding During and After Reading

Text-dependent questions draw the reader back to the text to discover what it says. These questions have concrete and explicit answers rooted in the text and frame inquiries in ways that do not reply on a mix of personal opinion, background information, and imaginative speculation. 

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These three scaffolding techniques are few of many that I have created around Robinson’s new book Whale Eyes. You can also find more about scaffolding on this blog post reviewing Fisher and Frey’s Scaffolding Playbook (Corwin, 2023) and this blog post on close reading how to’s.

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Feb 18 2025
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Culturally Resonate Teaching, lesson ideas, literacy, Teaching Reading, Universal Design Learning (UDL)

Enhancing Academic Discussions in Book Clubs

A colleague recently asked me how do I encourage students to stay in conversation and build academic talk among students during book club discussions. Cultivating a classroom community where academic talk and collaboration are at the center is something that is built over time and continually nurtured. Here is how I scaffold these conversations throughout the school year.

  1. Build Classroom Community – From the beginning of the school year students are working collaboratively in different ways and we talk about what collaboration looks like and sounds like. First, students are changing up their seats daily, sitting in triads and moving around often. The idea behind switching seats daily and sitting in triads is based on Peter Liljedahl’s The Thinking Classroom. Throughout the school year collaborative learning plays a big role in the active learning happening in the class period.
  2. Give Students Time to Prep for Book Clubs – When students are going to meet in book clubs, I provide ten minutes of class time before the book club meeting for students to review their notes, reread and mark important passages in the text they might want to share. If students are working in Literature Circles, students have specific roles for their book clubs, they must bring an artifact beyond reading notes to the book club to share. Giving students time in class allows everyone to focus and also allows time for reading conferences with students.
  3. Scaffold Book Talks with Roll the Dice or Bingo – In the beginning of the school year I might provide discussion starters and specific questions to help students focus their discussion on the topics we have covered in class during the book study unit. If students are at a loss for what to say or topics to raise, these two activities provide a question bank for students to keep the conversation going.
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4. Fishbowl Book Club Conversations – Fishbowl is a strategy that allows for students to observe a book club and provide feedback and observations. In the inner circle or fishbowl, students have a discussion; students in the outer circle listen to the discussion and take notes. This engaging and student-centered strategy can help develop group discussion skills. In the “fishbowl,” students practice responding to multiple viewpoints. Observations from students in the outer circle provide insight into what makes for effective small-group discussions. If you are going to conduct fishbowls in your classroom be sure to give your students a heads up so they are prepared to have students watching them. The visual below is from Teacher Thrive:

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6. Video or Audio Record Book Club Meetings – Recording book club meetings is a great way to evaluate the talk happening among students. Plus, showing the recordings back to the whole class provides an opportunity for reflection and examples of what works well in book club discussions. When Flip was available for educators, students would record 5 -8 minute highlights of their book clubs discussions. Since Flip has been retired, alternative screen casting tools include Screen Pal, WeVideo, Screencastify, or Padlet has a video tool.

7. Add In Reflections – One of the main benefits of reflection is that it deepens our understanding of what we have just read and offers wider perspectives. By taking the time to think about our reading and discussion, we engage with reading and talk about reading more deeply. Adding reflection about our role and contributions in the discussion helps us learn more about ourselves as readers and group members.

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Scaffolding book club meetings is crucial for student academic success because it provides a structured support system that allows students of varying abilities to actively engage with the text, develop critical thinking skills, and express their ideas confidently, especially when discussing literary concepts. When we offer clear guidelines, prompts, and differentiated questions to guide students through academic conversations and build upon student understanding progressively. These activities can help students practice expressing their thoughts clearly, use academic language, and actively listen to their peers’ viewpoints. 








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Jan 23 2025
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Assessment, Culturally Resonate Teaching, lesson ideas, literacy, Teaching Reading

Not Another Reading Quiz: 15 Alternatives to Check for Understanding

I gave up on multiple choice reading quizzes a long time ago. Yes, once in a while I will provide my students with a multiple choice reading quiz but these formative assessments are no stakes in my classroom. This means the multiple choice reading quiz is not going towards their grade. Students can take the reading quiz on paper or on a Google Form and see whether they are getting the “big ideas” and smaller nuances in the book. I am not going to ask questions about minutiae details, rather what does the text say, how does the text work, and what is the bigger picture. There are a lot of other ways that I can evaluate students reading beyond a quiz. When it comes to these reading comprehension activities I think about:

Engagement: Does the activity tap into students’ creativity and allow for personalized expression?

Deeper Thinking: Are students identifying the most significant ideas and making meaningful connections?

Accessible for All Learners: Are these activities adaptable and tailored to different ability levels so all students can reach excellence?

Here are 15 alternative activities to check students for understanding and elevate how we make our thinking about reading visible.

  1. Question Trails – A question trail is a learning activity where students “travel” from one station to the next by answering questions or solving problems. Each station includes a question and directs students to the next location based on their answer. The sequence of their journey depends on their responses, making it a self-checking, dynamic way to engage with content. You can take those multiple choice reading comprehension quizzes you have saved in your Google Drive and remake them into a question trail. Check out an example question trail I made for Richard Connell’s short story The Most Dangerous Game. 
  2. Written Response Questions (SAQs) – When I gave up multiple choice quizzes, I started to implement more short answer questions about reading. The questions were based on topics we addressed in class and our book club discussions. Students are able to use their notebooks and books to answer the questions and articulate their thinking about the readings. Students complete these SAQs in class in the time period provided. 
  3. Reader’s Notebooks – Notebooks are a key part of my middle school English classroom and students use their notebooks to showcase their thinking about their reading.  
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  1. Create a Playlist – Design a playlist or reading guide to help students stop and jot at key points in the text. Depending on your students, you might have students design their own playlist to highlight key events, connections, and extension activities. 
  2. Book Bingo – Students or the teacher can create a bingo board with 25 questions to ask about the book. 
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  1. 2 Truths and 1 Lie – Students have to provide a series of truths and lies about the elements in the text. 
  2. Close Reading Annotations – Provide students with a key chapter or excerpt/passage and students annotate the text marking up the page to highlight key ideas about the author’s craft, characterization, figurative language, and other key elements of the text. Go micro with these close reading annotations for a more powerful punch in the author’s craft.
  3. One Pagers – A one-pager is a reflective activity where students synthesize their learning by presenting their thoughts, connections, and insights in a visually appealing format. They include a mix of key quotes, images, symbols, and text to capture the essence of the material. It’s like creating a snapshot of their understanding in a creative, structured way. 
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  1. Socratic Seminars – Whether this is an all class read or students are working in book clubs invite discussion of the key themes and connections among all the books. 
  2. A Collaborative Quiz – Working in small groups, students create a 50 question quiz about the book with provided answers (take it up a notch and have them also provide the distractors for each question)
  3. Literary Postcards – Students design a postcard illustrating a key scene in the book on the front and on the back of the postcard the student writes from the perspective of the character describing in first person the importance and impact of the scene in the book. 
  4. Insta-Story or Post – Students design an InstaStory to showcase one of the characters in the book. 
  5. Poignant Scenes – Students choose three key scenes in the book and annotate the scene and provide a write up why and how the scene or chapter propels the story forward. 
  6. Musical Playlist – Design a musical playlist to coincide with the chapters or students can write an original song to highlight a key scene/character/conflict in the book. 
  7. Reenactments – Add a little drama to your class and have students act out key scenes in the book. 
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Jan 04 2019
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Make 2019 Magical!

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JK Rowling says, “Something magical happens when you read a good book.”

Tisha Richmond’s book Make Learning Magical: Transform Your Teaching and Create Unforgettable Experiences in Your Classroom is a book that will inspire and ignite. I first met Tisha through the weekly #XPLAP Twitter chat and was always enamored with the pictures and ideas she shared on Twitter regarding gamifying her culinary classes. I was honored when she contributed a chapter in my book Gamify Literacy (ISTE, 2017) on the culinary missions her students embark on each semester. Her passion and commitment to education is contagious. Taking cues from Mary Poppins and Mr. Rogers, she shows us that play, laughter, and fun is necessary for learning.

Make Learning Magical is filled with amazing magical learning experiences. She sprinkles joy and love in all that she creates. The seven components she writes about in her book and ones that I will continue to adopt in my own teaching include:

Memorable Beginnings – Warm welcomes, entertaining hooks, passion and enthusiasm are important in creating a classroom community. I love that Tisha has a coffee bar in her classroom and rewards students with a trip to the coffee bar for winning special challenges.  Think about the vibe in your classroom and what kinds of activities you can do in your classroom to build a spirit of community and belonging.

Authenticity and Agency – Kindness, gratitude, and passion are important, even more so, giving students voice in the classroom. Teachers need to provide more hands-on activities and connect with students to personalize learning.

Gamified Experiences – Immersive learning happens in Tisha’s culinary class. She has gamified each of her classes from Masterchef and the Great American Food Truck Race. She uses Mystery Boxes and mini games to promote learning and critical thinking. She deconstructs basic games and shows you how to design them into content specific learning opportunities.

Innovation – “Thinking about things differently, shaking up the status quo, and devising new and better ways of teaching – is how we make learning magical.” It is about being open to using technology in innovative ways and adapting existing things (and even lessons) for new purposes.

Creativity, Collaboration, and Curiosity  – Creating missions for students to demonstrate their learning and go above and beyond the required curriculum is another gasified element in Tisha’s classroom. She allows students to create videos and other artifacts to showcase their learning and talents.

Authentic Audience – School today is about real and relevant. The assignments that students create should help them not only get a grade in the class but also give them skills and knowledge they need to succeed outside of the classroom. Meaningful learning experiences are key. Students aren’t only creating for the teacher but for a wider audience and build connections.

Legacy –  “Every day we have the power to transform students’ lives.” How do you celebrate student successes and how can you help your students realize they have worth?

The new year has just started and our resolutions are in place to be better in the new year. Transforming our classrooms into a magical space where students feel valued and heard is important in building community and making learning happen. Tisha’s book has give me some new ideas how I can adapt my current practices and games in my classroom to spark magic, play, and meaning everyday.

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Jun 21 2016
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Playing with Legos for Classroom Learning

I just finished reading Quinn Rollins’ book Play Like A Pirate: Engage Students with Toys, Games, and Comics and found more than a dozen ideas to bring into my classroom. As a huge fan of Dave Burgess’ Teach Like a Pirate, I knew this was going to be another resource filled with ideas to engage students and energize teaching.

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In each chapter, Rollins takes on a toy, board game, and kid favorite by sharing ideas and examples how he has used them in his own classroom to promote learning and understanding. Whether it is action figures, Minecraft, or games like Monopoly and UNO, his teaching tools go beyond worksheets and textbooks to “playfully” teach his content material. Bringing in these games and toys does not only bring an element of fun into the classroom, but is also allows students to use their own critical thinking, creativity, and analytical skills. The chapter on Action Figures gave me many ideas for sidequest projects this upcoming school year.

As a parent to a future Lego engineer, the over flow of the Legos in my home has ended up in my classroom. Two years ago, I was able to get my son (then eight) to help me recreate scenes of Midsummer Night’s Dream for a slide show to share with my students and help with their understanding of Shakespeare.

Rollins’ book bolstered the idea to put the Lego work in my students hands. In small groups, students selected the most telling quotes from each Act in Midsummer Night’s Dream and then created a Lego scene to depict the quote.

The final products were great. I talked with the students’ about taking multiple shot types to help find the best angle to convey the scene.

Rollins offers additional ideas for using Legos in the classroom:

Design a Minifigure – Students could design the four most important characters in a novel or a historic archetype, or four leaders of a particular movement from history.

Design a Set – Students design a Lego set about a historical event. For example, a set for the Great Depression can include a Lego representation of the Okies on the Road to California or a Hooverville.

Lego Stop Motion – Legos is a great tool to make stop motion animation videos. YouTube offers lots of amazing examples to inspire students creativity.

As the late Jim Henson said, “Kids don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”

 

 

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Oct 07 2012
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Beyond the K-W-L: Activities that Activate Schema

One of my most popular posts this past spring was about alternative closure activities beyond the exit slip strategy.  After seeing the K-W-L activity (A brainstorm of what students know, what they want to know, and what students learned) over used often by teachers and pre-service teachers, I felt the need to create a list of alternative activities to kick off inquiry in the classroom.  Here are ideas, in addition to K-W-L charts, to activate prior knowledge and are alternatives to the traditional brainstorm.

1. Anticipation Guides – Before a new unit or a reading develop six or more true/false questions about the topic for students to respond to or agree/disagree with.  For example, prior to reading an excerpt from Ian Stewart’s Letters to a Young Mathematician, I asked my students to respond True or False to the following statements: Math is a bunch of numbers; I use math every day in my life; One should not have to worry about basic math because we have calculators and computers to do that for us; and There is math in everything we see, use, and do.  There were a total of eight statements regarding math on the Anticipation Guide.  After the reading I asked students to go back to the anticipation guide and check for accuracy in terms of the content of the article.  This became a great discussion tool for after the reading as well.

2. Four Corners – A great idea that was suggested by The Learning Network blog and a technique similar to an anticipation guide.  Students are asked to react in some way to a series of controversial statements about a topic they are about to study.  In Four Corners, students move around the room to show their degree of agreement or disagreement with various statements about, for instance, the health risking of tanning or toddler beauty pageants.

3. Gallery Walks – Another suggestion from The Learning Network, and a way to immerse students into a topic at the beginning of a unit is a Gallery Walk.  This is a teacher-created collection of images, articles, maps, quotations, graphs and other written and visual texts that offers students information about a broad subject. Students circulate through the gallery, reading, writing, and talking about what they see.

4. Webquest – Similar to the Gallery Walk, a Webquest is completed online and students are given a specific role to help investigate a topic or subject.  Whether they are a private investigator or a rock historian, their objective is to find clues and evidence that will help them understand a topic.

5. Quick Write and Journaling –  Ask students to write down or respond to a question or statement.  For example, “What would you do it if . . . ?”  Students could then get into small groups or with a partner to discuss their writing.

6. Poll Everywhere – Take your anticipation guide or pre-test online and have students use their mobile devices to answer questions regarding a topic – these questions should be true/false or agree/disagree.  There are many different free polling sites like polleverywhere and polldaddy to easily create an online quiz or survey.

7. Possible Sentences – Give your students a word splash or create a Wordle using a variety of words that will be in the reading or the subject being studied.  Students can work independently or in small groups to create possible sentences or make predictions about the words they will come across.  Later, students can revisit the sentences to check accuracy.

Another idea with the possible sentences is to have students create a “gist statement” using many of the words on the word splash which they predict will summarize the reading or topic.  Finally, they list the things they hope to discover as a result of the words they didn’t understand or questions that inspired the process (This idea comes from Daneils & Zemelman’s Subjects Matter)

8. Dramatic Role Play – Students work in pairs or small groups to act out a situation or event they will come across later in the reading or subject.  For example, in social studies class where the students are going to study the Boston Tea Party, break up the students in small groups and give them role play cards with a brief description about the event (don’t name any names yet). Students brainstorm and then act out what they would do.  Each group can take on a different perspective or give each group a different type of reaction to see different responses to one issue.

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